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Daily Archives: June 17, 2014

Many turn-based games have different systems for allocating time to players. Sometimes, these systems result in very negative experiences. Looking at Hearthstone, Magic Online, Poker, Chess, and Prismata, we analyze the effectiveness of these games at producing positive experiences through their time control systems.

In Hearthstone, there is a 90 second increment, with no timebank. (A timebank is time you can choose to spend on any turn.) This overly simple system is easy to understand, but has consequences for players. There is no future penalty for spending time now, and there is no reward for playing faster as you cannot save any time into your timebank. This is detrimental to the game for a few reasons.